 The first European settlers to arrive in the
area were the
Portuguese , led by the adventurous Pedro
Cabral, who began the colonial period in 1500. The
Portuguese reportedly found native Indians numbering around seven million.
A lot of these had a nomad lifestyle, with only limited agriculture and temporary
dwellings. However, there were villages that often had as many as 5000 inhabitants.
Cultural life appears to have been richly developed, although both tribal
warfare and cannibalism were ubiquitous. The few remaining traces of
Brazil's Indian tribes reveal little of their lifestyle, unlike the
evidence from other Andean tribes.The Brazilian Indians never developed a centralized civilization like
the Inca or Maya, and left very little evidence for archaeologists to
study: some pottery, shell mounds and skeletons. Today
there are less than 200,000 native Brazilians
left. Most of them live in the hidden jungles of the
Brazilian interior.
In 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral set sail from
Lisbon to try and reach India. Instead, he arrived on what is now the Brazilian coast.
Reputedly, this happened by 'accident', although some historians
say that the existence of Brazil was already well-known to mariners. In
1531, King João III of Portugal sent the first settlers to Brazil and, in
1534, fearing the ambitions of other European countries, he divided the
coast into 12 hereditary captaincies, which were given to friends of the
Crown. Cabral was followed by other Portuguese explorers, in search of valuable goods
for European trade but also for unsettled land and the opportunity to
escape poverty in Portugal itself. Most were impoverished sailors,
who were far more interested in profitable trade and subsistence
agriculture than in territorial expansion. The vast interior part of the country's remained
unexplored. The only item of value they
discovered was the pau do brasil (brazil wood tree) from which they
created red dye. Unlike the colonizing philosophy of the Spanish, the
Portuguese in Brazil were much less focused at first on conquering,
controlling, and developing the country.
Very soon a new source of wealth was imported into Brazil : sugar.
With the arrival of sugar came imported
slaves.The Portuguese
settlers frequently intermarried with both the Indians and the African
slaves, and there were also mixed marriages between the Africans and
Indians. As a result, Brazil's population is a melting pot of races to a degree that
is unseen elsewhere. Most Brazilians possess some combination of European,
African, Amerindian, Asian, and Middle Eastern lineage,and this
multiplicity of cultural legacies is a notable feature of current
Brazilian culture.
At the end of the 17th century gold
was discovered in the south-central part of the country. However, the country's
gold deposits were not very large, and by the end of the 18th
century the country's focus had returned to the coastal agricultural
regions. In 1807, as Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Lisbon, the Prince Regent shipped himself off to Brazil. Once
there, Dom Joao established the colony as the capital of his
empire. By
1821 things in Europe had cooled down sufficiently that Dom Joao could
return to Lisbon, and he left his son Dom Pedro I in charge of
Brazil. The following year Dom Joao tried to return Brazil to its
former subordinate status as a colony. His son, Dom Pedro
took a stance against his father and
declared Brazil independent from Portugal.
In the 19th century Brazil sugar was replaced by coffee
as the country's most
important trade product. The boom in coffee production resulted in an immigration
of almost
one million Europeans , mostly Italians. In 1889, the wealthy coffee magnates backed a
military coup, the emperor fled. From then on Brazil was no more an imperial
country, but a republic. The coffee planters virtually owned the country and the
government for the next thirty years, until the worldwide depression
evaporated coffee demand. For the next half century Brazil struggled with
governmental instability, military coups, and a fragile economy.
The first democratic election in almost three
decades took place in 1989. The Brazilians elected Fernando Collor
de Mello. Mello's corruption did nothing to help the economy, but his
peaceful removal from office indicated at least that the country's
political and governmental structures are stable. Vice President Itamar Franco became president in December 1992 on
Collor's resignation, and in November 1994, Fernando Cardoso was elected
president. Cardoso has reduced the inflation rate significantly since
taking office, but this has been offset by the loss of two million jobs
between 1989-96 and ongoing problems with agrarian reform - now being
treated as a national security issue. According to a 1996 United Nations
report, Brazil has the world's most unequal distribution of wealth. Still,
that didn't stop Cardoso from comfortably winning a second four-year term
in 1998.
Nowaday's, Brazil has the sixth largest population in the world--about 148 million
people--which has doubled in the past 30 years. Because of its size,
there are only 15 people per sq. km, concentrated mainly along the coast
and in the major cities, where two-thirds of the people now live: over 19
million in greater Sao Paulo and 10 million in greater Rio.
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